FIT Teams Shut Down in Brighton

FIT teams have been forced to retreat from the Smasho EDO/ITT demo in Brighton. Due to a large number of participants engaging in Fitwatch tactics, they are not able to get any footage.

People have physically pushed, shoved and kicked them out of the demo. A mobile CCTV van was blocked and forced to drive away. Two FIT officers trying to stop someone from doing graffiti were pushed away.

This shows what can happen when we collectively resist our oppression. We no longer have to be passive victims to this policing - we can fight back and we can shut them down.

Congratulations to all those involved in Brighton and good luck for the rest of the day.

CO11 and ACPO at Brighton

FITwatch are here publishing details and photographs of public order cops that had on-the-ground responsibility for implementing the cordons and kettles, and the use of batons, pepper spray and dogs against EDO protesters in Brighton last June and October. They are all regular faces, and well known to FITwatch, although we do not yet have names for all of them.

Many of them were seen at the Smash ITT demo in October hitting demonstrators with batons, particularly 2058 and Paul Mather . Steve Discombe appeared to be directing a dog team against protesters on the hill behing EDO, at the time when a working journalist was bitten by a police dog.

Others seemed keen to direct pepper spray at faces that they knew.

The cop that displays the number 1818 was allegedly involved in raiding the houses of people arrested (and later acquitted) at previous demonstrations.

Given the fuss over the G20 policing for Brighton's mayday could be very different from previous events, and these thugs might be told to stay at home. But just in case they do turn up, it's good to be informed about the type of people we are dealing with.

If you have any information about any of these cops - perhaps you have taken a complaint against them, or have statements from them relating to court cases - please let us know.

The Essex globetrotter

Some of you will recall the Essex FIT officer, 13, who was in London for the Put People First march on 28 March. Not content with tripping to London for that, he's also been seen keeping an eye on a range of unsavoury right-wingers in Newcastle at a St George's day rally, none of whom appear in the pictures. Curiously he was with that other well known travelling cop, 1818, who we covered a couple of years ago.

London - 28/03/09

Then Newcastle for George's Day

1818 - coming soon to a demo near you

Questions to answer

Outside City Hall today was a man who should have been inside, helping the Met Police Authority with their enquiries. Here seen on the right, PC Alan Palfrey, EK127, who appears to have witnessed the incident immediately preceding Ian Tomlinson's death, was not in the chamber, but rather watching demonstrators outside City Hall, along with the copper formerly known as 'Laughing Boy,' CO5466 Cowlin. He's not laughing now. But then who would, when paired with a man with as dubious a sense of humour as Alan Palfrey.

Brighton Mayday - Continuing the Resistance

Much publicity (including our own) surrounding the G20 has been based on portraying protesters as victims, instead of celebrating our victories. Both at the G20 and at other demonstrations throughout the last year, people have increasingly been adopting militant tactics and refusing to submit to oppressive policing.

EDO protests in Brighton have been prime examples in this trend. FIT teams have been kept on the run, police lines have been broken, and space has been reclaimed. Protesters have set the terms of their own demonstrations, and despite massive attempts at intimidation, have been extremely successful.

This year, Mayday celebrations will be focused in Brighton with Smash EDO calling for a "mass street party against war and greed." Fitwatch will be supporting this call and are asking for as many people as possible to adopt Fitwatch tactics and shut the evidence gatherers down.

Given the G20 publicity, policing Brighton Mayday will be in the spotlight. The FIT teams and their masters at the Public Order Unit are responsible for the G20 policing, and they are responsible for Ian Tomlinson's death. We must show we will not tolerate these officers on our demonstrations, and we must hold them to account for their actions.

We are not all victims. Some of us are fighting back. Join Fitwatch and continue this resistance.

There will also be a Fitwatch workshop in Brighton at the Anti-Militarist Gathering at the Cowley Club, 10am, 3rd May.

The tactics of containment

It has been very interesting in the last few days, to read the range of comments posted here about the police justification of policing the G20 protest and the tactics of containment.

It has been particularly interesting to get some views from TSG officers themselves. One, going by the name of MCM comments, “we were doing our job, we were doing what we were told and we were getting on with it and we were doing exactly what we were trained to do. If you don't agree with the training then fine, but don't try and persecute us for doing what we are trained to do.”

Personally speaking, I can’t help but agree that the officers highlighted in the G20 footage were doing nothing out of the ordinary. It may not have been justifiable – as was also said on the comments page, protesters behaving the same way would “be in front of a magistrate within days”. But it certainly wasn’t unusual. For many years now the police have been operating a policy of containment (as opposed to dispersal) of demonstrators, and this is what it looks like. It is close up, and involves kettles and cordons and inevitable pushing and shoving of protesters with hands or shields and the extensive use of batons. As MCM says, “this has been going on for years - especially at football - because we are trained to Police public order situations that way.”

Containment as a tactic was developed by the police as a way of avoiding the sort of full-on confrontation seen at the Poll tax protest in 1990. According to many commentators, including academics and police themselves, the widespread violence was largely caused by police dispersal tactics, such as baton charges and horses being ridden at crowds of people. The criminologist academic Peter Waddington suggested that the police should have contained rather than dispersed the crowd, and the tactic of ‘kettling’ was born.

Containment has been widely criticised, apart from the violence inherent in it, because it involves the lengthy detainment of people who have committed no offence. MCM’s views on this are revealing. “The tactic of containment or kettling DOES work however, by having a significant majority of people who don't want trouble they naturally keep the minority in check, even after many hours of getting bored and pissed off.” I suspect that ‘the significant majority’ may have some understandable objections about being held for hours on end, without water, without food, without toilets, sometimes in the cold or wet, just to ‘keep the minority in check’.

As a tactic containment has surely has reached the end of the line. For years it has been a disaster waiting to happen, and now it has resulted in a death. I stand to be corrected, but as far as I know, the UK police are the only ones in Europe to operate such a strategy. Police elsewhere in Europe adopt more of a stand-off approach, interfering less and using dispersal methods (tear gas, water cannon) from a distance in cases of disorder. Police have criticised this idea as being even more likely to produce injury, but I have no figures on this. But clearly has the significant advantage of allowing people to go home!

Yet European tactics seem unlikely to be adopted here. It runs counter to the UK police’s philosophy of ‘preventative policing’, and I suspect that CO11 and their FIT teams will be particularly loath to let the ‘kettles’ go. They have provided extraordinarily useful opportunities for CO11 and their FIT teams to get photos and personal details of political protesters. In fact, I suspect ‘kettles’ have sometimes been formed for entirely that purpose.

So where will we go from here? I suspect we may see attempts, by police and by press, to make divisions in political protest between the good protesters (law abiding and compliant) and the bad protesters (those who object to having their movements restricted, who defend themselves from police batons, who push at police lines or who may be prepared to damage property in expression of their dissent). The politicians will then seek to give more freedom to the former, whilst putting even more restrictions on the latter.

I fear that the police focus on ‘preventative policing’ of demonstrations will end up being strengthened rather than weakened. This could lead to ‘bad protesters’ being treated increasingly like terrorists, having their movements monitored and being pulled from their beds in ‘anticipation’ of crime or public disorder. Not unlike the action taken against a group in Nottingham last week. Given the ease with which the police can currently go after suspected ‘terrorists’ without apparently even a shred of evidence, that is a worrying thought indeed.

I hope I'm wrong. I hope that all the G20 coverage and the awakening of middle England in outrage at police brutality will bring about a greater degree of freedom for all of us. But I'm not holding my breath. Instead, I think it will ultimately be down to us to get a hell of a lot better at protecting ourselves (and others) from G20 style policing.

Your number's up

This is CO5466 Cowlin, pictured on 2 April at the Royal Exchange with EK127 Alan Palfrey. Curiously, while Cowlin's shoulder number should be CO5466, here he appears to be modelling CO5456.